A capillary network includes a set of devices connected using short-range radio-access technologies (such as Wi-Fi and BLE) to a cellular network. A capillary network has two types of nodes: capillary-cellular gateways and devices, Capillary-cellular gateways (also referred to as capillary gateways. CGWs) have an uplink via a long-range network as well as a short-range network, while devices only have short-range radio-access technology. Capillary networks utilize the leveraging of the cellular networks to globally connect Internet of Things (IoT) devices and integrate security and network management into the IoT paradigm.
Typically, capillary-cellular gateways will include in its network all the IoT devices from the area covered by its short-range wireless technologies. The management node will manage the devices' connectivity through the capillary-cellular gateways. However, in some cases, some IoT devices will not belong to any capillary network. These devices may either not have any granted access to any of the networks, or the devices (or the owner of the device) will prefer not to join a capillary network. Moreover, some devices may not be within the radio range of the capillary-cellular gateway. Instead they will form a multi-hop self-managed network between themselves, with only one or a few of the devices being manageable and within reach of the capillary-cellular gateway.
In those cases, those IoT devices will still need connectivity to the network. One option is that the IoT devices connect to their own wireless or cellular networks. Another option is that the IoT devices connect to another node that belongs to the Capillary network.
In this last case, the management node of a capillary network does not have any means to know if a node outside the capillary network has connected to its managed network. Besides the security treat which represents these types of unknown connections, those nodes could consume the resources of the capillary network and destabilize the load in the different capillary-cellular gateways. Thus, connecting other nodes indirectly to a managed node would disturb the load balancing between the managed nodes.
It is apparent that the capillary networks could restrict the connection of unknown devices to its network. However, in some cases, it might be convenient that those devices connect to the network. Many of those devices might have specific security constraints to be outside a capillary network or might contain private information which the devices do not want to share. Nevertheless, the devices still need some connectivity to some network and might find that connectivity through devices connected to a capillary Network.